In Martyr!, the debut novel by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, a troubled young man is searching for a reason to live. Cyrus, the son of an Iranian migrant factory worker in Indiana, lost his mother in an infamous 1988 air disaster, when a US missile cruiser mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in the final months of the Iran-Iraq war. This formative trauma has left a terrible legacy: when we meet him, in his late 20s, he’s a recovering alcoholic, struggling with fragile mental health and an unhealthy dependency on pharmaceutical sedatives; he “often wept for no reason, bit his thumbs till they bled”.
An aspiring but unproductive writer, Cyrus has a fixation with martyrdom, and is researching a book on the subject. “It’s not an Islam thing,” he clarifies, “[it’s] about secular, pacifist martyrs. People who gave their lives to something larger than themselves.” To this end he travels to New York and interviews an older, terminally ill Iranian artist, Orkideh, who is exhibiting herself in a Marina Abramović-style exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. They strike up a tender rapport, and Cyrus gradually begins to work through his issues.
The story is set in 2017 but the narrative intermittently skips back in time, revisiting Cyrus’s childhood in Indiana and his parents’ life in late 1980s Iran. Growing up as a bisexual Iranian in the American midwest, he cultivated a “pathological politeness” in order to get by; campus open mic nights in Indiana were “a safe little oasis of amongness”. The third-person narration is interspersed with chapters told from the perspectives of various other characters, including Cyrus’s uncle Arash, a PTSD-afflicted veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, and Zee, his roommate turned lover. There are surreal dream sequences featuring Lisa Simpson, Donald Trump and the Persian poet Rumi; and occasional fragments of diaristic prose-poetry. The story’s disparate elements are neatly interwoven, even if the plot device that sets up the resolution is a little far-fetched.
The prose is richly expansive, chock full of elaborate similes and therapeutic introspection. While the candour and sensitivity of Akbar’s narration gives it an easy relatability, the novel is let down by a lack of subtlety. Martyr! has something of the incontinent earnestness of an emo record, from Cyrus’s fretfulness about the cosmic futility of creative writing (“It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet”) to his florid bursts of self-loathing. In one passage, he berates himself as “a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown”. This angst has a naive quality that would befit a 17-year-old protagonist but feels curiously arrested in someone about to turn 30. A light sprinkling of Farsi idioms lends texture to the dialogue, although Akbar’s decision to render these expressions in awkward, baldly literal English translations is aesthetically questionable.
We are told that Cyrus is prone to “the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering”. However, his obsession with martyrs isn’t fleshed out in the way you’d expect in a serious novel of ideas. A few scattered references to Bobby Sands and Joan of Arc function as a kind of placeholder – evoking, essentially, the idea of ideas – but the real meat of the story is a melodrama of mental ill health, encompassing a veritable potpourri of psychic pain: grief, displacement, PTSD, addiction, despair, suicidal ideation. While these themes should never be off limits, there is something to be said for not laying it on too thick. For all its well-intentioned sincerity, this novel’s emotive overkill has the effect of numbing the reader’s empathy. It’s not quite “trauma porn”, but it’s not far off.
• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is published by Pan Macmillan (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
